Barack Obama, Congress | featured news

While White House strategists believe that Republicans will be blamed as the cuts’ effects slowly emerge, President Obama risks political damage if Americans end up just shrugging at the reductions.

The nation’s capital was enveloped in a familiar kind of gridlock late Monday, as Republicans again demanded that President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats act first to put off $85 billion in automatic cuts slated to take effect on Friday.

So it's looking more and more like Republicans will propose an alternative to the sequester: It would kick in, but Obama administration agency heads would have control to reallocate where the cuts hit at their discretion, so they're not imposed in a slap-dash across-the-board fashion. Among those suggesting this idea: National Review and Karl Rove.

House Speaker John Boehner and a top aide to President Obama are duking it out in competing columns over who is to blame for the sequester. "It is a product of the president's own failed leadership," wrote Boehner in The Wall Street Journal, nine days before the sequester -- $85 billion in automatic budget cuts -- kick in.

President Obama, back from his three-day golf getaway, on Monday made use of his bully pulpit, while Congress remains out all week, to turn up the pressure for a bipartisan agreement to avoid indiscriminate across-the-board budget cuts that will otherwise hit March 1.

Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, plans to seek a vote on Chuck Hagel's nomination as President Barack Obama's new secretary of defense during a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the committee said on Monday.

A leading Republican senator is threatening to hold up Senate confirmation of President Obama's nominees to lead the Defense Department and the CIA until the White House provides more answers about the deadly Sept. 11 attack against a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.

President Barack Obama told fellow Democrats from the House of Representatives on Thursday he is willing to agree to a "big deal" with Congress on spending cuts and tax reforms to end the fiscal uncertainty over the U.S. deficit.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday will propose that Congress pass a small package of spending cuts and tax reforms to put off the "harmful consequences" of huge automatic spending cuts known as the "sequester" for a few months, a White House official said.

President Obama on Monday tried to undercut National Rifle Association leaders and appeal directly to their membership, claiming gun owners support the "common-sense" gun control measures he's proposed -- and urging those supporters to "keep the pressure" on Congress.